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State Forest Tapped for Massive Clearing

Swift and monumental change may soon come to blighted landscapes in
the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest, which lies at the geographical and
ecological heart of Martha's Vineyard.

In the name of biological diversity, fire safety and the appearance
of the forest, more than 500 acres of dead and dying trees in the red
pine plantations - together with healthier but meteorologically
doomed trees in adjacent white pine plantations - are now expected
to be cut down and shipped away within the next year.

The ambitious new logging and removal plans began to develop earlier
this month. James Rassman, management forester for southeastern
Massachusetts, told the Gazette this week that the Department of
Conservation and Recreation, a newly organized state agency that assumed
ownership of the forest last year, plans to prepare bids and solicit
logging companies that specialize in the complicated and expensive
business of removing vast numbers of trees from offshore islands.

"If [the logging companies] walk away and say, ‘No way.
It's not enough wood, or not enough quality, or it's too big
of a hassle, or the dock isn't right,' or whatever -
then we're back to the drawing board," Mr. Rassman said of
what he believes may be the last chance for the state to get rid of the
alien and degraded trees all at once.

The logging operation is aimed at clearing away the remaining exotic
trees that were planted over the course of the past 80 years on up to a
quarter of the state forest - a 5,146-acre landscape of vital
ecological importance to the Vineyard, the state and southeastern New
England. Historically unscarred by agriculture, the state forest
contains the densest undisturbed concentration of rare plants and
insects in the commonwealth - and perhaps, species for species, in
the northeastern states, according to scientists who have studied it.

The commonwealth wants to remove all the stands of planted trees
that remain in the forest. This amounts to 528 acres - some 175
acres of white pine, 350 acres of red pine and a few Scotch pines
scattered among the red and white.

Plants found in the state forest that are considered fundamental to
the ecology of the Island include bushy rockrose, sandplain gerardia and
sandplain flax. Insects and moths in the same category include the
barrens buck moth, pine barrens metarranthis and purple tiger beetle.
The forest plantations now threaten these indigenous species by crowding
and overshadowing them, scientists in several ecological fields say.

"We've replaced our native system, at least partially,
with this nonnative component," Tim Simmons, restoration ecologist
for the state Natural History and Endangered Species Program, told the
Gazette this week. The indigenous and threatened Island wildlife
"is worth preserving and has a higher value than those poor,
stunted, old, salt-blasted pine trees ever will. I think the
documentation that this place is very different from other places, and
every square inch of it is important to us, is an important
recognition."

The red and white pine trees - which were planted in two
massive operations between 1925 and 1941, and then again in the
mid-1960s - grew to maturity on about 1,100 acres of the ancient
scrub oak barrens and frost bottoms historically known to Vineyarders as
the Great Plain.

Because of them, there is also a rising concern about the threat of
wildfire in the forest.

The U.S. Forest Service reports that the southeastern Massachusetts
landscape is the third most flammable area in the continental United
States, after the Oakland hills of California and the pine barrens of
New Jersey, according to Aaron J. Whiddon, forest fire patrolman for
Dukes County.

Forest managers and ecologists say removing most of the remaining
pine plantations will lower the risk of a catastrophic wildfire in the
forest. They say it will also clear the way to restoring native
processes - controlled burns and techniques that mimic burning,
such as mowing at critical points during the year - that will at
once reduce the risk of future fires and benefit rare and native plants
and insects on the old scrub and pitch pine woodlands.

"We're in a situation where we would like to just get
rid of our nonnative plantations and essentially restore them to native
vegetation," said Mr. Rassman. "But it would create a huge
amount of biomass [or] fuel. What are we going to do? We can't
just chop this stuff down and leave it on the ground."

No Island sawmill has the capacity to deal with the wood that
clearing the plantations would produce, Mr. Rassman said. It amounts to
more than a million board feet of marketable lumber and an additional
5,000 cords of pulp wood. A mainland logger said recently that shipping
the wood off-Island would be prohibitively expensive for any company
that did not have its own barges and tugs.

"So it's all going to come down to the
transportation," Mr. Rassman said. "What is it going to cost
[a logger] to cut the tree, get it to a dock, put it on a boat and get
that boat to the mill? My guess is any value in the wood is going to be
eaten up by transportation costs. That's how it works. We're
going to be nervously saying, ‘We hope it's good enough that
they can make a profit on it. Or keep their equipment running when they
normally don't have business,' " he said.

"If we do this," Mr. Rassman added of the logging
operation, "we can't go out and just pick away at it.
Because this type of company, with its equipment and people - they
need volume. So it would be a pretty heavy effect on the Island. Even
though out of 5,000 acres, we're only talking about 500,
it's still 10 per cent." He said the goal is to start and
finish the job during a single fall, winter and spring, perhaps as early
as next year.

State forest officials are concerned about the reaction of the
Vineyard public to the idea of a massive logging operation that clears
away great stands of trees - even if they were trees originally
planted for logging - in the interest of ecology, fire safety and
aesthetics.

"First, do people feel comfortable with the idea of managing
the state forest on Martha's Vineyard as a natural, functioning
ecosystem, made up of native species?" Mr. Rassman asked.
"And also protecting human health and safety by reducing fire
risk, or proactively avoiding catastrophic fires by getting rid of fuel
buildups in these plantations?"

He continued: " ‘Theoretically, I can go for
that,' an Island resident might say. Now the next part is, what
would that mean? That would mean cutting 528 acres of trees. Okay,
that's a little more to deal with. Now you've got to go back
again and review why you're thinking about doing it. Bit by bit is
the way I see the process. Explanation is the key."

Though clearing the skeletal red pine plantations that line the
Edgartown-West Tisbury Road and reach deep into the forest may make
sense to Vineyarders, taking down soaring, healthy white pines may
trouble them, Mr. Rassman said. The problem is that a mainland logging
firm won't take the worthless red without also taking the more
valuable white. A successful bidder will be contractually bound to take
both, Mr. Rassman said.

Mr. Simmons said the white pines present an inevitable ecological
and fire safety problem of their own.

"The white pines, the red pines, the Scotch pines -
they're all going to go down anyway," he said. "These
things are terribly vulnerable to tropical storms and hurricanes. And as
we saw after Gloria [in 1985] and Bob [1991], they took the brunt of
those winds and we ended up with a mess of crisscrossed timber that was
very, very expensive to then salvage-harvest. So our assumption is that
with or without us, these trees are going to go down, probably in a
catastrophic manner. To do it neatly, and fundamentally ecologically and
economically, is much better than watching them die on the stump."

The state forest was originally established in 1908 as a reservation
for the heath hen, a subspecies of grouse that by 1870 had been wiped
out everywhere in the east except for Martha's Vineyard. The heath
hen went extinct on the Island in 1932, even as the state began planting
the tracts of red and white pine in the sandy scrub oak barrens of the
old Great Plain.

The pines were intended to create a Vineyard lumber industry, but
the marketplace never materialized. The red pines were planted south of
their natural range and fell victim to a devastating fungal pathogen,
diplodia pinea, which has left them a wintry-looking ruin wherever they
stand or fall. The white pine, unthinned and afflicted years ago by a
weevil that reduced the lengths of saleable saw logs, never grew into
the trees they might have been.

"They were put in at a time when natural-resource managers
were dominated by foresters," said Bill Patterson, a forestry
professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, "and
almost all of society felt that barrens were worthless land and should
be used for an economic end. So they tried . . . . [But] red pine and
white pine don't thrive in these soils, in this environment, with
the pathogens that are out here. It makes sense to liquidate these
plantations. Even if you can't make money on it, you're
better off getting rid of them than you are maintaining them."

The former heath hen reservation eventually grew to nearly 5,200
acres and became the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest, named for the
superintendent who ran it from 1948 to 1987. Among its virtues -
the vast and strange beauty that both separates and connects it to the
rest of the Island; its trails for riding, cycling, running and walking;
and its wilderness for hunting - the state forest protects the
single freshwater aquifer serving the whole of Martha's Vineyard.

"I'd say it's the absolute anchor," said Mr.
Simmons of the state forest. "All the populations of things
we're concerned about out there [on the Island] would have a much
higher probability of being extinguished if it were not for the state
forest. All the large properties out there are important. But as a
dynamic Island group of habitats, the state forest is absolutely
paramount. Success in the long term is not possible without a healthy
state forest. And statewide and region wide, it's unrepeated
anywhere else."

Mr. Rassman said public education, planning, permitting, bidding and
contracting a logging operation must happen quickly, or probably not at
all.

"The quality of the wood is going by," he said.
"Anybody that would be partially interested is not going to be
interested in it two years from now. So if we're going to do this,
we've got to do it quick."